George Condo is recognized as being one of the most influential living artists. For a career spanning more than four decades, Condo's highly original and distinctive body of work has consistently drawn upon art historical traditions and genres, old master techniques, and American popular culture to forge a singular artistic vision.
In the 1980s, his work strikingly fused the sensibilities of European Old Master painting with references to popular American culture, while in the 1990s, Condo introduced what he termed Artificial Realism, which explored a psychological rather than observational approach to portraiture. Over the following years, the extreme representations of the psyche evolved. Between the mid- and late 2000s, Condo explored new subjects in the Portrait series, which drew on 16th century Mannerism and particularly on the works of Pontormo. While the imagery's references to the Old Masters were overt, Condo upturned the traditional function of the portrait—an honorific, idealised representation—suggesting instead an almost sinister or psychologically violent presence.
George Condo, b. 1957, Concord, NH, lives and works in New York. His works have been acquired for permanent public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris.
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